Content marketing appears as a simple solution to foster customer acquisition. It only takes creating a blog and everything is set up. Yet, content marketing is not about writing sales pitches, but about providing value to your target audience.

Let’s take a look at the definition of content marketing, why it’s important for your brand, what type of content you need to produce and how you can distribute it.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing has been around for a long time.

In France during the early 1900’s, the tire manufacturer, Michelin, published a guide to help their customers enjoy good food, while travelling on the road. This is how the Michelin Guide was born.

Michelin brought some valuable content to travelers using their car and benefited of the exposition of the brand when customers needed to buy some new tires. And this is something that was most likely to happen during long business trips or family trips to spend summer vacations.

So what is different from regular marketing?

Marketing is about selling benefits of a given product or service. A sales pitch, also called copy, is used to explain to your customers why they desperately need your product to solve their problem. Content marketing is different. You are not forcing your sales pitch to a customer. What you want to do is provide value through content.

Seth Godin, NY Times bestselling author and famous marketer, wrote a book about this, called Permission Marketing. He is opposing Permission Marketing to Interruption Marketing. Customers do not like to be interrupted when consuming valuable content. First, your brand needs to obtain the permission of the audience by providing so much value, that they will accept your sales pitch.

Gary Vaynerchuk, NY Times bestselling author and entrepreneur, also writes about this in his book Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. He explains why we need to “give, give, give and then ask”, bringing so much value that permission is granted to do a sales pitch.

To sum up, content marketing is about:

Providing value to your target audience through content

without interrupting them with a sales pitch.

And Now, Why Content Marketing?

To Craft Your Story

First, content marketing will help you craft the story of your brand. It is important that you find the right tone and explain why you are in this business. You can also explain where your company’s expertise come from by showing why your team is the best. Making the whole team participate in this process will humanize your brand.

To Listen to your Audience

Choosing topics to write about will require you to pay attention to what bothers your customers and what they like to talk about. Organizing a solid watch process to listen to your market is a prerequisite.

To Show your Expertise

Once you’ve listened to what your customers want, you will be able to explain why you are legitimate to operate in your market. You will show your audience that you understand their pain points and the challenges they encounter everyday.

To Build a Community

Content marketing is also a way to connect with other actors on the market. Influencers, potential partners, potential customers interacting on social networks are an opportunity for a new relationship. Having a blog and good content to share while setting up the relationship will give you legitimacy.

To Be Quoted as a Reference

When you produce “evergreen content”, which is content providing timeless value, your blog has more chance to be quoted as a reference and benefit from a better rank in search engines. When you give tips to write good headlines, the value provided has more chance to be accurate a few months after being published.

To Get Leads More Likely to Convert

Content marketing can be efficient for customer acquisition. When you use a channel like Google Adwords, you pay to display a copy to somebody searching for a keyword. The chosen keyword will help you in your segmentation. Content marketing will help you reach your target audience more easily by providing them value. If your topic is relevant and your content valuable, you will build up your brand awareness. If your blog appears regularly in the eyes of a target, your call to action will have more chance to be acted upon.

To Benefit from Multiple Distribution Channels

Social medias, writing platform like Medium, content recommendations applications are channels to consider when distributing your content. All your efforts in developing a content strategy and tackling subjects your audience care about, will definitely help your brand through multiple acquisition channels.

Because It’s The New SEO

If your content is referenced on other websites, it will increase the number of back-links toward your website and will help to improve organic search. This is the new way to work on your search engine optimization. You are not optimizing your website for keywords anymore. You are now making it more relevant to your audience.

What Types of Content ?

When content marketing is mentioned, marketers instantly think about blogging. A blog is actually a good way to start but it shouldn‘t be the only option. Content must be thought through, by creating a content strategy: choosing a tone of voice, imagining a compelling brand story, choosing topics and channels, optimizing storytelling through these channels.

Articles on a Blog. A blog is your home base to publish valuable long-form articles. This is a place where you can decide what messages should be displayed around your blog post (i.e.: call to actions). However, be careful not to interrupt the audience too much. Popup windows call to actions convert a lot but you may scare off some other people who don’t like that kind of interruption.

Email Updates are an important channel to deliver content directly to customers and leads. It helps deliver value directly to their inbox. You can use this to distribute newsletters or articles from your blog in advance, before broadcasting it on social networks (make them feel special).

eBooks are massive amounts of value distributed at once to your target audience. It may be a strategically organized mix of blog posts around a same topic. It can help you gather contacts more easily.

Webinars are great ways to produce content by doing live presentations. It provides opportunities to connect directly with your audience using voice and slide-decks.

Online Courses are the next step after webinars, they can help provide more value through videos, and interactivity. It is easy to make consumers pay for a course through a training distribution platform(Udemy, SkillShare,…), if it brings enough value.

Video Content is also a good way to provide interactive value to your customer as well as a good amount of entertainment.

Audio is a good medium to deliver interviews or recurring shows through tools such as SoundCloud or iTunes Podcasts.

Organizing Events is still underrated and not always considered as content marketing. It is a good way to create content on your favorite topics and gather your community. It is also very useful for ensuring that your team gets in contact with your target audience.

Micro-content on social platforms must be used to tell your story and optimize your content communication on every platform. You must adapt to the platform in its way to deliver messages, and the way the audience likes to consume it. On that subject, this book from Gary Vaynerchuk is a must read : Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook

A Note on Repurposing Content

Content is meant to be updated. Why? Because you learn more and more everyday from your team, your partners and your customers. You can decide to modify an article by changing the title and putting the accent of some part of it. You can decide to share tiny bits as it has more impact on another platform. You can also decide to transform a meaningful article into a presentation and add visuals to prove your points.

Be sure you don’t repeat yourself too much and that the new form of a given content will help more people or will bring some more value.

Distribution is a Big Part of the Job

20% of your time must be spend on producing content and 80% on distributing it.

Home base channels

Those are your blog, your Facebook page, your twitter page, your company page on LinkedIn, your Pinterest account. There, people choose to follow you and expect from you to provide value. Curation of the best articles in your market will help you deliver value and it will give you room to share your own content. However be sure to post at least 80% of content that aren’t your own so your followers won’t think this is just a promotional channel.

Outreaching

Reaching out to people in your industry is a good way to distribute your content. If you write an article that you know will interest an influencer or if you quote that influencer in your article, don’t hesitate to send a message to that person so they can check it out. If they find the content useful they may share it on their network. If they are influencers it may result in a better distribution. Be careful not to focus only on the biggest ones. There are a lot of influencers in any market. They may not have the biggest network, yet they can have an engaged audience that will help you reach even more people.

Distribution Platforms

Distribution platforms like Medium, Youtube, Slideshare are also content creation platform. You can use them, but think about the format of content people are used to consume in there. For example, if you create a slideshare presentation with a lot of text and no visuals, people won’t enjoy your content. Think about the platform and repurpose your content so that it can be efficient.